International Seminar (30 November – 1 December, 2017)

Politics of the Spirit: Internationalization of Hispanic Modernity in the first half of 20th Century

The international seminar Politics of the Spirit: Internationalization of Hispanic Modernity in the first half of 20th Century aims to analyze the role of Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese and Latin American cultural mediators in the institutionalization of Hispanic culture in the early 20th century by means of institutional networks such as the PEN Club or the International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation (predecessor to UNESCO). For the purposes of the seminar we define institutionalization as 1) the emergence of the first cultural policies for the standardization of the cultural field and 2) the inclusion of Hispanic writers and intellectuals in an institutional and transnational cultural network.

This seminar seeks to revise the traditionally peripheral position of Hispanic modernity in existing bibliography and to demonstrate that Hispanic mediators not only took part on the international cultural arena but played a crucial role in the multilingual and intercultural networks of the time. This seminar aims to map the intellectual sociability of a group of mediators through their participation in the PEN International, the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, the League of Nations, the various international conferences organized by these institutions, and the effect of these associations in their respective national contexts. It will also allow us to study how the mobility of these agents functioned as a shared transnational space for both the institutionalization of culture and the dissemination of the various cultural and political national projects, and for the increasing cosmopolitanism of the Hispanic field.